At the time, I was furious. How could she give up an opportunity like that? And how could she pretend it had anything to do with me? I screamed that she was pretending to say something kind, that she was pretending to be worried about me, when we both knew it was our father she was worried about. He was the reason why she was stupidly giving up a free Princeton education. I was certain she thought that without her there—to act as his buffer, to act as his protector—I would try to break him. I would try to break him of all his rules, of all his trauma. And she didn’t know if he could handle it. Would he get better if he were stripped of his crutches? Or would he just be defeated?
She was so angry that she stormed out. I thought she hadn’t liked getting called out for the truth—that she didn’t want to defend herself again for bending herself in every possible position to protect our father. But what if I had been wrong? What if the truth was that she had been staying for me? Maybe she had thought that, if she left me with him, he would crush me instead?
I walked over to the window seat, and sat down on a strange bamboo pillow. I looked out the window, at the front yard, the guesthouse in the distance.
I had always felt so subsumed by our house, by the rules that governed it, rules I never understood. That didn’t change, being here again.
I’d spent the last eight nights in my car on the side of my childhood driveway, waiting for the lights to go off, so I knew my sister was asleep. One night, I’d watched through the window as my sister and her daughter had a late dinner. My sister’s boyfriend hobbled around in the background. They weren’t eating anything fancy. A pot of pasta, bagged lettuce. But she was happy, my sister. Her daughter ate as Rain leaned in and listened to her speak of her day. My sister had built a family—she had built a life she enjoyed—and I had judged her before she even started.
You had to ask yourself: Where did that judgment get you?
There was a sonogram hanging over the rearview mirror in my car. A healthy little baby. Strong heartbeat. The start of limbs. I didn’t know if it was of a boy or a girl. But it was on the way. There was a baby on the way that belonged in part to someone who didn’t think he knew me anymore. Where would that picture be hanging in the alternate reality where I hadn’t become a stranger to him? Where I had confessed before it was too late? Where he had confessed too?
For the last eight nights, I’d waited until the lights had gone off, until I knew my sister was asleep, so she wouldn’t look at me with a mix of pity and aggravation that I was still sleeping on her couch. So I wouldn’t have to look into her face and see her dismissal. So I wouldn’t have to think about her and her daughter and my husband and my father and everyone who’d once loved me and whom I had somehow lost.
Tonight, I didn’t have to wait for her lights to go out. I curled up on the floor in my childhood bedroom, on someone else’s soft mat. And I realized I’d been wrong about something else. Maybe the most important thing. I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started.
44
In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I’d had a bottle of wine the night before. My shoulders were sore from sleeping cramped up, my head spinning from the heat.
I opened the window, letting in the chill, the soft breeze, and I saw her staring at me from her tiny loft window.
Sammy.
She looked confused, for just a second, about why I was in the main house. Except her happiness at seeing me there must have trumped her questioning.
Because she opened her window wider.
“Hi,” I mouthed.
“Hi,” she mouthed back.
Then she peeked behind herself as though she was going to get caught.
When she turned around again, I pointed toward the stairs, leading to the beach and the ocean.
She gave me the thumbs-up and closed the window, already on her way there.
“So you and Mom had a fight?” she said.
We sat on the rickety stairs, the beach right beneath us, the ocean winds strong and thick.
“We’ll work it out,” I said.
She fought to keep her hair pinned behind her ears. “I don’t know how, if you guys are avoiding each other.”
“You noticed that?”
“Well, I do live here.”
I smiled. “I don’t want you worrying about it, okay?”
She nodded. “What were you doing in the other house?”
“Visiting,” I said.
“Why?”
I sighed. “That question deserves a longer answer than I think you’ll be able to sneak away for. Where did you tell them you were going?”
“Seashells.”
I laughed.
“Mom is already at work, but Thomas said I could go for a little while. He’s waiting on me, though. We’re going to the Pancake House on the way to camp.”
“That sounds delicious,” I said. “Thanks for sneaking out to meet me first. I’m really happy to see you.”
She shrugged. “I don’t really get to see you anymore.”
“I didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with you.”
She scrunched up her face. “Why would I think that? My mother didn’t really want us hanging around together. There was no choice.”
I felt my heart burst at her empathy, her understanding. At six years old, she had already surpassed her aunt and her mother.
I leaned in and gave her a hug, like I hadn’t missed the first six years of her life, like I had any right. Maybe that was the thing about regret. Once you felt it, you went out on a limb to try and feel anything else.
“I think you’re pretty great,” I said. “And I want you to know that in case your mother kicks me out again.”
She blushed. Actually blushed. “Okay, next time you can just say it.”
I reached down to the sand and picked up a white seashell, handing it to her. “For your cover story,” I said.
She looked over my shell choice disapprovingly. Then she tossed it back onto the sand and began searching for a different shell.
“Let’s at least make it believable,” she said.
45
Not the next night, but the night after that, I arrived at the restaurant an hour before my shift, in time to eat the staff meal and relax before the dinner rush.
As I walked into the kitchen, Douglas met me at the door.
“Hey, you have a visitor out front,” he said. “And she’s looking for you. The real you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t really know, Sunny. Ask her.”
Then he motioned toward the dining room, where Julie was sitting at the bar, nursing a glass of wine.
I wiped my hands on my jeans. “What does she want?” I said, more to myself than to Douglas. Apparently, though, he felt compelled to respond.
“So you’re pressing the extent of my knowledge. And my interest.”
He stalked off, and I headed into the dining room. I instinctively looked down at myself—taking in my sweater, pulling my hair behind my ear, trying to look presentable.
“Julie?”
She looked up as I arrived by the bar. “Sunny! I didn’t think it was true, but here you are.”
I forced a smile. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? You’re a tough woman to track down.”
She moved her purse so I could sit down beside her.
“Do you want some wine?”
I reluctantly took a seat on the bar stool next to her. “I’m good, thanks.”
She tilted her glass in my direction. “I’ll drink for both of us, then,” she said. “Cheers.”